Words Fail

Dragon Comics 127

In panel 4, The Man isn’t upset that the Girl got frosting for breakfast. He’s jealous because he didn’t get frosting for breakfast.

Waffles are pretty simple; it’s the first thing thing the kids were able to cook completely without supervision. While writing this, I suddenly thought of something that happened 20 years ago, while making waffles for the guy I was dating my last semester of undergrad/first semester of being a supposed adult. Possibly, he was making waffles for me, under my supervision. But I said something to the effect that it was silly to worry about screwing up the ironing of the waffle, and then I said something like, “You’ve got to be a complete moron to fuck up a waffle.” And for whatever reason, he thought that was hilarious, and for the rest of our relationship, sometimes he would catch my eye and say, “You’ve got to be a complete moron to fuck up a waffle.”

Seriously, toaster waffles are full of all kinds of stuff you don’t need, and a waffle iron costs maybe $25. It probably pays for itself in a weeks’ worth of breakfast, and it’s so simple a small child can operate it. Message me at this page and I will send you the recipe for regular waffles or for gluten free waffles that are so good a lot of people prefer them to regular waffles. I have strong feelings about homemade waffles.

The other thing I was thinking about was a friend who does standup comedy, who was laughing at another comic because she had seen the second comic performing the exact same set a dozen times in a row. I said, “If you want to be a comedian you should probably try to write a joke every day,” and she laughed and agreed. I imagine that people who are serious about comedy write at least 1 new joke every day. It may not be a good joke, but the point is that, say you are only successful (like you think of something truly funny) 20 percent of the time, you would still have 6 new jokes a month. If you’re funny less than 20% of the time you might not have a future in comedy.

So then I told another friend that anecdote, and she marveled over my production of a daily blog 5 days a week. I try to write 4 comics a week (not that they’re all funny) and some weeks I only manage 1 or 2, but the main thing is to crank out new material, not rest on your laurels. I probably only write 2 really successful, upvoted/shared posts a month, but the more comics I write, the more traffic I get.

It’s way easier to have an idea during the day and mull it over for a while before you get to work than it is to come up with something when the clock is ticking and you’re staring at a blank page. I try to have an idea before 10 pm, but it’s not always possible.

That led me to think about the writer Bonnie Jo Campbell, who once explained to me her concept of “the sitcom moment of the day.” She says, “If you search through every day, something really funny happens. You just have to look for it,” and that’s the sitcom moment of the day. She meant it as a counterweight to depression, but it’s a great tool for writing comics. You can read all the things she told me that day on my old home page. The formatting is old school web wonky–all the apostrophes are replaced with white question marks in black diamonds–but it’s still readable.

This is all to say that this comic is pretty much non-fiction, except the waffles were lunchtime waffles and The Man pointed out the frosting connection over text, since he was on break at work.